


Clara and the Frog Prince

by TheSaddleman



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Aging, Confessions, F/M, Hugging, Humor, Love, Romance, Self-Doubt, anti-ageism, continuity references, self-confidence, whouffaldi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-15 10:09:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15410631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSaddleman/pseuds/TheSaddleman
Summary: When the Doctor doesn't arrive for their Wednesday rendezvous, Clara starts to worry. When she finally gets to see the Doctor, she experiences his true face for the first time. But can she help get him back to the way he was?





	Clara and the Frog Prince

The TARDIS was not waiting for Clara Oswald in Coal Hill School’s storage cupboard like it often was after classes ended for the day on Wednesday afternoons. And it wasn’t waiting for her in her flat when she got home, either. 

This was not unheard of, of course; for a Time Lord, the Doctor often lost track of time. But, of late, he had placed a priority on being there to meet Clara every Wednesday, without fail. He said so himself that the rest of the days of the week had just become filler for him while waiting for what he called “Clara Time.” And, especially after the episode on Skaro with Missy and Davros, the two had become so inseparable that it was only her sense of duty to her students, combined with the Doctor insisting that she keep ties to Earth and her time period and her family, that kept her from throwing her lot in with the Doctor full-time and changing her mailing address to “c/o The Universe.” So missing their time on Wednesday? These days? Without so much as a call? Simply not “a thing.”

Still, Clara tried not to worry. When it used to happen, it was usually explained away as absent-mindedness or a TARDIS “malfunction.” There was probably a reasonable reason for this one, too. And the Doctor was a two-thousand-very-odd-year-old Time Lord. Even though he occasionally cast doubt on the fact, he was perfectly capable of taking care of himself.

But Clara couldn’t help her mind flashing to images of her Doctor languishing in some alien prison (again), or trapped at the end of time (again), or undergoing some form of torture at the hands of Missy (again), or unconscious on some side street in Luton after tripping over a brick. (She assumed not again, though the Doctor once claimed that tripping over rogue masonry ranked in the top ten causes of regeneration; they’re more dangerous than bricklayers would have you know, apparently. But, then, he’d also then added that shaving mishaps ranked third, so Clara really wasn’t sure what to believe.)

One hour turned into two. Clara had already agreed with herself that, at three, she’d give Osgood a call and check if UNIT had heard from him. After all, they’d sort-of helped her track down the Doctor when he’d exiled himself to medieval times (she refused to allow Missy any share of the credit on that). But, in that case, he’d actually informed her beforehand that she might not see him for a while; “special mission,” he had called it. She’d found herself unexpectedly upset by that, especially when he refused to tell her why or where, nor did he accept her offer of help. Even the fact he’d arranged for her to receive security clearance equal to his own at UNIT didn’t make things better. But, at least, he’d told her in advance. (And, OK, there was a lot of cool stuff in the Black Archive to fill Doctor-less Wednesday evenings and she might have tripped and sto-, er, borrowed a couple of outfits that once belonged to Romana. Hence the recently installed padlock with deadlock seal on her bedroom closet, courtesy Osgood.)

This time … she tried to recall if the Doctor had mentioned something about skipping their rendezvous. She checked her voicemail messages to see if there was a new one from him; she'd had to break up a fight between two students in the hallway around two o'clock, so she might have missed a call. Nothing. 

She spent the next sixty minutes pacing (another) groove into her carpet. As hour three approached, she picked up her mobile again. “Ring, damn you,” she said to it. She nearly dropped the phone when it instantly obeyed. The avatar of the grey haired stick insect on the screen immediately took a weight off her chest. “Doctor? Are you OK?” she said, barely giving the call time to connect.

The voice she heard at the other end of the line had a Scottish accent, and sort of sounded like her Doctor, but it was dry, hoarse … like it was a million years old. “Clara… I’m … sorry I didn’t … call earlier. Been a bit... busy.” The voice was slow, methodical, like its owner was using every last bit of willpower to speak. Of course it was _him_ , but that weight went back on to Clara’s chest because she knew that something was wrong.

“Doctor? Are you alright? You sound … different.” Clara said, her eyes wide.

“I’m fine, Clara.”

“You know you can’t lie to me, Doctor. Something’s wrong. And you sound diff… oh, God, Doctor, if you got yourself regenerated, I swear, I will-”

“No, Clara … I haven’t regenerated.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’ll handle it,” the Doctor replied.

“You’ll handle it. Doctor, you sound like you’ve given your vocal chords a rub-down with sandpaper, so, unless you went off and performed a rock concert at Glastonbury— _without me_ —then something is wrong.”

“Clara, nothing-”

“Can you fly the TARDIS? If so, bring her here, to my flat.”

“Listen, young la-”

“ _Now_ , Doctor.”

Clara rang off, turned on her heel, and ran nose-first into the side of the TARDIS. She gave the side of the big blue box a slap with one hand and rubbed the tip of her nose with the other.

“Ow! Stop doing that!” she said to the ship. “Just because you remembered how to do silent landings doesn’t mean you can go around startling people in their living rooms and bruising their noses…” Clara suddenly grimaced as she realized that slap had actually _really_ hurt, “…and their hands.” She went to open the door. It was locked.

“What? Doctor!” She reached into the neck of her blouse and fished out the key she kept on a simple string. Which proved to be a wasted effort as the keyhole was missing. As was the secondary keyhole. And even the third one the Doctor didn’t know about. This time, Clara didn’t care that slapping the side of the TARDIS was both a) futile and b) painful.

 _Bang, bang, bang_ “Doctor! That’s not fair! Put the keyhole back and let me in!” _Bang, bang, bang_ “I want to help you. Come on. Please?” She stopped banging on the door and instead gave it a little knock.

A croaky voice came out of a hidden loudspeaker along the top of the TARDIS. “Clara-” The rest of the sentence was drowned out by squealing feedback, through which Clara thought she recognized a Gaelic swear word; it was hard to tell as she was too busy covering her ears and worrying about yet another noise complaint from the neighbours. “Sorry. Still had the volume set for my guitar. I don’t want to see you. Not now.”

“Then why is the TARDIS in my living room?" Clara said.

“Free parking?”

“Even for you, that’s lame. Come on, Doctor. It can’t be that bad. I want to see you. Please?”

The door opened. Inside, the console room was quiet, save for some of the controls beeping. And the room appeared totally empty.

“Doctor?” Clara asked. “Where are you?”

“Up … here.”

The quiet voice came from the mezzanine, in the direction of the Doctor’s reading chair. Clara had a sudden flashback to sitting on the Doctor’s lap in that chair a few weeks earlier as they flipped through a portfolio of his photography (she wanted her own copy of the selfie with Mary, Queen of Scots). To be fair, Clara had originally been sitting on the armrest of the chair and she’d slipped off. At least, that was her story and she was sticking to it. Far as the Doctor was concerned, she was simply bringing her eyes closer to the pictures.

At this moment, however, the chair appeared to be empty.

“Doctor, have you gone and turned yourself invisible again?” Clara asked as she approached the chair. “Because the flicking my nose gag was cute the first four ti-” Clara stopped mid-syllable, mid-breath—if she could have managed it without keeling over, she would have stopped mid-heartbeat, too.

There was a being in the chair. That was the only way to describe it—a being. Large, dark eyes framed by angry eyebrows dominated a shrunken, inverted-pear-shaped, bald head. The creature’s body was no more than a couple of feet long, and was wrapped in a pair of way-too-large trousers and what Clara recognized was the Doctor’s favourite bunny hug (that was a term Clara learned during a visit to Canada; the world outside of Saskatchewan calls it a hoodie, but she liked “bunny hug” because it always made the Doctor blush adorably. He’d then reply, “This is not a ‘bunny hug,’ Clara,” to which Clara would then reply, “You’re right— _this_ is,” and give him a big hug. It had become a bit of a thing of late).

Emaciated, tiny arms gripped the sleeves of the bunny hu-, er, hoodie as the creature looked up at Clara, uncertainly.

“Doctor, what’s happened to you?” she said as she kneeled down next to the chair.

“How did you know it was me?” 

“No one outside of the Jim Henson Workshop can fake those eyebrows. Who did this to you?”

“The Master.”

Clara seethed. “Has Missy changed back? Where is the Master? I’ll make sure I have more than a pointy stick with me this time.”

“No, no, this all happened centuries ago,” the Doctor explained. He tried to continue talking, but was racked by a cough that bent him double. Clara reached over to—she wasn’t sure what she could do, actually. Pat him on the back? Give him the Heimlich? But the Doctor waved her away and was able to get enough air into his shrunken lungs to continue. “When the Master was Harold Saxon, he imprisoned me for a year in an alternate timeline and … ‘degenerated’ me to show how I’d look if I’d lived for nine hundred or so years without regenerating. How I would really look.”

“And you ended up looking like this,” Clara completed.

“No, I said I was only about nine hundred years or so old with the Master did it to me. Back then, I just came out looking like Dobby the Cute House Elf. But add a millennia or so and now I look like Kreacher the Grumpy House Elf.”

“You said this was centuries ago. So what’s happened?”

The Doctor tried to sit up, but couldn’t. Clara ran and grabbed a pillow from another chair and slipped it under the Doctor’s back. He smiled his appreciation, though the smile appeared to only be in his eyes … his mouth seemed incapable of such a motion.

“Degeneration … is not natural. It’s bad enough that _re_ generation often causes changes that we don’t ask for, but what the Master didn’t realize is that the randomness can go both ways. So a few times since then I’ve occasionally … changed back into this. I’ll be working or reading or being chased by a Dalek and then suddenly I’ll see the golden light and _voom_ , I’m a house elf.”

“That’s terrible.” Part of Clara found herself trying not to laugh at the absurdity, while the other part was ashamed at the first part for even thinking that.

“Some sort of delayed ripple effect, is the best I have ever come to figuring it out. Like how some recreational drugs users report flashbacks, hallucinations and the like, years after giving them up. But it hasn’t happened to me since Trenzalore.”

“When on Trenzalore?”

“About two centuries after I started my sentinel duty in Christmas town. Only lasted about an hour, and then I was back to what appeared to be normal.”

“So this is just temporary, then?” Clara found herself taking the Doctor’s small hand. She was hesitant to squeeze it too hard for fear of breaking something. But there was hope in her voice.

The Doctor shrugged. “Actually, this can be permanent. But I am supposed to be able to switch back using willpower—similar to how I can cause regeneration energy to emerge, even if I’m a long way away from actually changing. But this time, it’s different.”

“What makes it different?”

“Shall we start with the fact I actually look like Kreacher the Grumpy Elf, even when I’m full size and hiding my true age?”

“You do not look like Kreacher. You _act_ like Kreacher sometimes, but on exam days I turn into Bellatrix, so I should talk.”

The Doctor managed to get his mouth to smile a little. “And Armitage is…”

“Voldemort, of course. Does it need saying?” Clara said with her own sad smile. “Doctor…”

“I’ve been trying for hours, but I don’t think I can change back this time,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because I was better at fooling myself before. The first time this happened, I still looked like Casanova. The second time, a young and strapping Prince Philip in a bow-tie. It was easy for me to believe that the ‘real me’ was fake. But now … I mean, you’re always calling me an old man. People seem to think it’s improper for us to be travelling together, when they’re not assuming I’m your father or grandfather, even.”

“Doctor, don’t say that.” 

“Clara, I can’t change back because I no longer believe the lie.”

“What lie?”

“That I’m not an old man. I _am_ an old man.”

“You are not.”

“What part about two-thousand-and-whatever-the-hell years don’t you understand? And that’s only an estimate—I lost track when some bad stuff happened during the Time War, so I don’t know how old I really am anymore. No one does. I restarted the count at nine hundred and left it at that. I could be billions of years old. So I should look it. You need to know what I look like.”

“Why?”

“Clara, I said a long time ago that I’m not your boyfriend. You need to know why I could never be.”

That made Clara’s heart run a little colder, as her mood became a bit darker. “What are you saying, Doctor? That I give a damn how old you are? Why would you say that? Haven’t you been paying attention for the last God knows how many years we’ve been together? You are looking at probably the least-ageist person on Planet Earth.”

“I don’t think you understand.”

“Did you actually, honestly, just say that? To me? I’ve made it perfectly clear that I do not go for cute young men. Er, OK, I think I just said that to Vastra and Jenny. So, there is a bit of new extra backstory for you, I guess. You’re welcome. But, yes, you did look like a cute young man when I first met you. But what made me fall … what made me interested in you was what was inside and the fact you had lived through so much. And you are a good man. That’s what attracted me to you.”

“What about Danny Pink, then? He wasn't much older than you,” the Doctor said, wondering if he’d regret invoking P.E.

“Yes, Danny Pink was young. But I fell for him because he was an old soul and a good man. I didn’t care what he looked like. I would have felt the same for him if he’d been fifty-five, balding and overweight.”

The two sat in silence for a moment, temporarily having run out of points and counterpoints.

“So you’re convinced you can’t change back, because you think that I think you’re old. Is that the problem?” Clara asked.

“Like I said, you call me an old man all the time. I am what it says on the tin.”

“You really are thick sometimes, Doctor. Do you honestly think you have the market cornered on euphemisms? Would you like me to draw you a picture of what I mean when I call you Old Man? Is there any way I can convince you?”

“Clara, it’s not so easy. My conscious mind might believe you, but my subconscious beats to a different drum and he’s not buying it.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’d have changed back before you’d finished your bit about euphemisms just now if he had.”

Clara got up and paced for a moment. “There must be a way,” she said.

“I’m open for any ideas. Otherwise, we’re going to have to start thinking logistics. I’ve been pretty much stuck in this chair all day, and I might need your help in building a rig to allow me to access the console—or even just get off this bloody chair. I can control some things mentally, but it leaves me knackered after.”

Clara kneeled down next to the Doctor again. “So we just need to convince your subconscious that this isn’t the real-real you, right?”

“That’s correct, Clara.”

“Tell me, Doctor, have you ever heard of _The Frog Prince_?”

“Heard of it, why Clara I co-wro—MMMFFFFF!”

Clara’s lips had closed over the Doctor’s. It was a chaste kiss, to be sure—the Doctor wasn’t in any physical condition to handle anything more—but it was a kiss all the same. She held it for a moment before pulling back. “I don’t give a damn what you look like or how old you are, my prince,” she said, her voice low. “You may be an old man, but you are _my_ old man.”

A golden glow immediately enveloped the aged Doctor’s tiny body, which seemed to expand in the chair. Tight, parched skin became supple and grey hair began to return to a head that was quickly regaining its proper proportions. The glow got so bright, Clara had to shield her eyes as she stood back from the chair.

By the time the glow had faded, the Doctor was back to his full size, having filled out his trousers, once again resembling a robust man in his mid-fifties. 

“Ahh, that’s more like it,” the Doctor said as he bounded out of the chair, the hoodie that had been draped over him falling to the floor. He bounced on the balls of his feet. “It feels so good to be tall again!” 

Clara laughed as she handed him the hoodie, which he quickly shouldered on. “See, my prince, all you needed was some convincing.”

“And I knew you’d come through for me!” the Doctor said as he give Clara a tight hug. “All I needed was to inspire you into doing something rash to get me to change back,” the Doctor said as he let go of Clara, whose smile suddenly disappeared.

“Hold on. Something _what_?” she said as she followed him down the steps to the console.

“Needed you to get so desperate to change me back, you’d start thinking out of the box. Convincing my subconscious that you’re in love with me? Masterful improvisation! Sheer genius!” He gave her the OK sign with his right hand. “Now, where would you like to-”

Clara stopped him with a sharp finger-jab to the upper chest. “ _Improvisation?_ Is that what you think that was? Improvisation?”

The Doctor seemed puzzled. “What else could it have been?”

“Doctor, I honestly meant what I… Doctor?” 

But the Doctor was too busy setting switches on the console to pay attention, mumbling about taking Clara to experience people made of smoke and cities made of song. 

Clara couldn’t help but chuckle. What was the use? Maybe someday he’d realize, though there were the odd moments where she’d turn her head a second too early and catch the tail end of a glance, just a glance, where it really seemed like maybe he did. Was he really that oblivious? Some day, one way or another, she’d find out for sure; hopefully before she’d herself become an old woman for real. That wasn’t something she was planning to rush into, having had the preview thanks to the dream crabs, but if they were still together, it wouldn’t be so bad. 

And, anyway, the two of them would probably figure out a way to beat this whole aging thing altogether. Two immortals. Clara and the Doctor. In the TARDIS. Forever.

Silently, she wrapped her arms around the Doctor from behind and squeezed. The Doctor looked down at her and smiled his disarmingly toothy grin.

 _Yeah_ , Clara thought, wistfully, _that’s a plan_.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was in part inspired by my feelings over the growing ageism I've seen displayed against Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor and the Whouffaldi concept in recent months.
> 
> Concordance time:
> 
> The gag about tripping over a brick comes from "The Next Doctor". The alien prison refers to the novel The Blood Cell.
> 
> I attempted to fill a major plot hole related to "The Magician's Apprentice"; given how Last Christmas" ended, it felt out of character for Twelve to have exiled himself without doing something for Clara, and letting her know not to worry, even if he didn't tell her where or when he was going.
> 
> The Doctor made himself invisible and flicked Clara's nose in "The Caretaker".
> 
> "Bunny hug" is a real word. Well, if you're from Saskatchewan it is.
> 
> The Jim Henson Workshop reference is a nod to the character of Rigel in Farscape. Who had mighty eyebrows indeed (as did his voice actor, the late Jonathan Hardy).
> 
> The aged Doctor of course refers to the events of the Series 3 finale, "Last of the Time Lords". 
> 
> I don't think the Harry Potter characters need explanation.
> 
> "People made of smoke and cities made of song" refers to what the Seventh Doctor tells Ace in the closing moments of "Survival."


End file.
